Turing & Burroughs: A Beatnik SF Novel (29 page)

The waitress was a chatty woman with a halo of dark curly hair and a pink round-collared blouse.

“Looking for a place to live?” she said, noticing them reading the ads. “With the world coming to an end? I’m Tina. Maybe I can help.”

Bill didn’t respond to the overture. Instead he asked for more coffee.

“The three of you want to rent together?” pried Tina when she returned with the pot.

“Bill and I are homosexuals,” said Alan. “And Susan’s a widow. A
mènage a trois
. Do you mind?”

“Haw,” guffawed Tina. “Putting it right out there.” She leaned over the table, lowering her voice. “I spotted you boys for queers. So, guess what, my girlfriend and I have a granny cottage to rent! Half a mile down the road. We’d be glad to take you in. You’re the right kind of grannies. You got jobs?”

“Not yet,” said Alan. “That’s quest two.”

“They’re hiring some tech staff at the National Labs,” said Tina. “Some big-ass LANL project gearing up. It’s about those skug things?”

“The Venusian sea-slugs, you might say,” said Bill. “The Happy Cloaks. We’re experts on them. From way back East.”

“I want to apply to be a skug-hunter,” said Alan. “Yes indeed.”

“Me too,” said Susan. “But I wonder if LANL will hire us. Since we’re from out of town. There seems to be lot of paranoia just now.”

“LANL needs warm bodies,” said Tina. “They’re so gung-ho that they’re doing interviews tomorrow, even though it’s Sunday. I hear they’ve got a special watchdog thing to keep out any skuggers who try to sneak in.” Tina gave them a cool, thoughtful look. “It’s called a skugsniffer? He’s a captive skugger, and he uses telepathy to detect any other skuggers among the applicants.”

“You know all that?” said Susan, taken aback. “What kind of blabbermouth security people does LANL have?”

“Los Alamos is a company town,” said Tina, twinkling. “Everyone knows everything. Or tries to. It’s kind of a status thing. And if you’re a waitress...” She gave a cute shrug.

“So where’s this granny cottage of yours exactly?” said Alan, not wanting to get any deeper into secret-sharing.

“I’ll draw you a map,” said Tina. “Maybe you passed my place on your way in. My girlfriend’s at the house right now. Sue Stook. She runs a vet business out of the house. I can phone her. Blonde, tough like a cowhand, cute. She’s a top.”

“I’m a top these days,” said Alan, enjoying the word. “Right, Bill?”

“And I’m the lowliest baboon of them all,” said Bill, bending his long, thin lips into an imbecilic, self-satisfied simper. “My dance-card filled in by my superiors.”

“Is that really true?” asked Tina, leaning closer. “About baboons?”

“Why do you think they have those hairless, mauve rear-ends?” said Bill. “It is as Allah wills.”

By nightfall, they’d settled into Sue and Tina’s granny cottage. Even though it was snowing again, Alan was grilling them a steak on the open porch in back. It wasn’t so much that he was hungry as that he enjoyed performing so traditional an American activity.

“Feels like a vacation,” said Susan. “Vassar would like it here. In the flesh.” Her round chin quivered. “Oh, Alan, How can a human body disappear from one day to the next? And the Earth just keeps rolling on?”

“I like the idea that Joan made it all the way up,” put in Bill.

“But Vassar’s gone,” wailed Susan. “I want him to visit me again.” She raised her voice as if calling to someone in the next room. “Vassar! Vassar!”

Silence. “Ned made it all the way up, too,” put in Alan, just to say something.

“Up to
where
?” said Susan, almost in tears. “What are we even
talking
about?”

“The ancient Egyptians called it the Western Lands,” said Bill, slipping into his own kind of academic mode. “The high heaven beyond the ordinary afterlife.”

“Did you see the high heaven while you were dead on the floor in Mexico City?” asked Susan.

“I saw a cyclone in a circus tent,” said Bill. “And at the tip-tiny top I saw a bright hole. If a ghost makes it through, they’re off the slaving wheel for good. And Joan did go through.” He scowled at Susan. “After she shot me with the dime-store cap-gun you handed her, Susan, and thanks very much for that, by the way.”

“Joan had us ensorcelled,” said Alan. “It wasn’t Susan’s fault. And anyway you needed to pay your karmic debt, Bill. I’m just glad your brain
healed
.”

“Wal—I’m used to harsh rushes,” said Bill, with an assumed air of pride. He jiggled the ounce of brown heroin he was still carrying in a cellophane cigarette pack. “I could ride a harsh rush right now. Too bad I can’t execute the physical motions to snort this fine Mexican H. I’m, like, paralytic. My skug’s like an internal parole officer. And that, in my measured opinion, is a sufficient reason for annihilating all of the skugs on Earth. Not that I feature working for the US Army here.”

“I am most assuredly going for those LANL job interviews tomorrow,” said Alan. “The National Labs are the blokes who built the hydrogen
bomb
, you know. Top-drawer mad scientists. I’ll be in good company, albeit as a fifth columnist.”

“Fifth columnist meaning that you hope to undermine the LANL project and turn everyone into a skug?” said Bill, drily. “As I’ve asked you before: Doesn’t this strike you as anti-human?”

“You’re only playing the spoiled child because you can’t sniff your silly heroin,” said Alan. “But think it through—surely you don’t expect that opiates do wonders for your personality? Or for your sexual performance? Do remember that we’re here together as lovers, dear.” Alan stretched out his shapely arms. “We’ve
yummy
young bodies, too. Fresh and pert. We should enjoy them.”

“Indeed,” said Bill with a grudging smile. “I only wanted to make the point that the skugs are mind parasites. I didn’t quite grasp this at first. But we’ve seen the skugs’ ilk before. Hypnotic propaganda loops. Addiction demons. Possession by ugly spirits. The skugs are an unusually virulent type of mind parasite—as biologically real as typhus bacilli. Opportunistic creatures sliming into us like liver flukes.”

“Timid
goooooose
,” said Alan, streching out his neck to a length of three feet in mime. “What’s so wonderful about our current society, Bill? The rulers are set on to murdering me, and I shouldn’t doubt that you’re on the kill list too. If we can spread the skugs planet-wide, we’ll be safe, and we’ll raise humanity to a new level. Why must the masses remain stupid and dull?” Alan glanced over at Susan. “Which side do you plump for, my dear?”

“I’m a composer,” said Susan. “Not a yakker like you two. One real plus about being a skugger is that I can use my body as an instrument. As for LANL, I want to get my hands on their big new computer. It’s called MANIAC?”

“Operated by Alan’s hebephrenic mad scientist peers,” put in Bill.

“By the way,
MANIAC
is a joke name,” said Alan, setting the steak on the kitchenette table. “Purportedly it’s an acronym for Mathematical Analyzer, Numerator, Integrator, and Computer. In reality, the engineers wanted to cock a snook!”

“Way too British,” said Bill.

“Like I say, I want MANIAC to run some sound-synth programs,” said Susan. “Higher acousmatics. We’ll simulate musical instruments weirder than anything anyone can build.”

“Do as you like, you two, but
I
won’t be carrying the bomb-factory lunch pail,” said Bill. He gestured at the pastel plywood kitchen with the speckled linoleum floor. “I’m a lord of this mountain redoubt. Restored from exile. As you know, I attended the Los Alamos Ranch School when I was fifteen. I still remember our school song.”

Bill cleared his throat, then sang with raspy energy, throwing back his head for the final line, savoring it.

Far away and high on the mesa’s crest

Here’s the light that all of us love best

Los
Aaallll
-amos.

“What was the school like?” asked Alan.

“I had to do exercises before breakfast, clean my plate at meals, stay out in the cold all afternoon, and ride a sullen, spiteful horse. In the school song, the light on the mesa’s crest—that prefigures the atomic bomb, you understand. Note that in 1942, the Army tore down my school and set up their Manhattan Project right where I used to have my oatmeal. All of time is one instant, no? I learned this in the Beyond, my little ones. The atomic bomb is the orgasm, is the bullet, is my brain.”

“So,
oookay
,” said Susan, rolling her eyes. “Alan and I go off to apply for work tomorrow. And you’ll be here alone, Bill, and—?”

“Well, if I can’t get loaded, I might as well write a fresh segment of my perennial memoirs. I’ll lead off with some snappy boyhood sex-talk, milk my routine about shooting Joan, segue into multiple degeneracies among the skuggers, and culminate with Joan’s apotheosis. Coda: my mad, bony, street-preacher rant about seeing beyond the veil. I found a pen and a pad of paper here already.
Mektoub
. It is written. Or will be soon.”

“Let’s go to bed, my darling scribe,” said Alan.

The next day was clear and sunny, colder than before, and with the mountain skies a pale manganese blue above the coruscating snow banks. Sunday morning. Their landlady Tina appeared at the door of the granny cottage, bearing a pan of home-made cinnamon buns.

“I’m on second shift this week,” said Tina. “So I thought I’d nip back here and nose into your plans. I see you found the spare nightgown, Susan. Very yummy. I’m glad you three are here. I noticed you guys through the Bow Wow windows yesterday before you came in. In the slush, with your matching coats. No bags. Like gunslingers.”

“Sinister fugitives,” said Bill, lighting a cigarette.

“Glamorous,” said Tina. “You have no idea how dull and straight Los Alamos can be. Oh, I should tell you that over the years some used clothes have accumulated in your closets. Businessy kinds of things. Help yourself. And the interviews are at the LANL main auditorium at 10 am. They’ve definitely got that skugsniffer I was talking about. So be ready for him.”

“We’ve had dealings with a skugsniffer before,” said Susan carefully.

The sentence hung in the air for awhile, nobody wanting to touch it.

“I sure hope you’re not scheming to rat someone out,” added Susan.

“I’m no kind of straight arrow,” said Tina with her frank, country smile. “I’m for letting it all come down. I don’t care what you guys are.”

“Just as a matter of interest, let me tell you a little about the skuggers versus skugsniffers thing,” said Susan. “One of the big deals with skuggers is that they have telepathy with each other. A skugsniffer is an enslaved skugger who teeps the presence of any nearby skuggers. And then the cops know to kill the skuggers.”

“Is there any way to trick a skugsniffer?” asked Tina, intrigued.

“If skuggers know a telepathy scan is coming, they can put up a mental block and the skugsniffer might not notice them,” said Alan.

“I’d be surprised if that move still works,” said Bill. “Respect the slyness of the pig, Alan. The twinkle of the trotter. A mental wall—that could be seen as a tip-off.”

“Perhaps one could run a second-order imitation game,” mused Alan, thinking aloud. “An inner emulation. And—” He stopped himself. “But, as Susan says, this is all quite hypothetical. No point rattling on ad infinitum, eh? Did you say 10 am, Tina? Perhaps the widow Green and I will be on our way.”

“I’m writing today,” said Bill with a let’s-get-down-to-it air of anticipation.

“I love all this bohemian stuff,” said Tina.

“I’d be grateful if you could bring me a sandwich, a tot of bourbon, and some coffee later on,” Bill told Tina. “I’m happy to pay.”

“Sure,” said Tina. “I can do that. I’ll come around noon.” She took her leave. “Good luck, you three.” She paused and turned back. “Oh, one more thought for you, Susan and Alan.”

“What?”

“Don’t tell the LANL security where you’re actually living. In case they were to come for you. Give them a fake address. Say you’re at, I don’t know, the Cowboy Motel up past the Big Bow Wow.”

Alan and Susan dressed up like office drones and set out on foot along the two-lane highway that bisected the town. It was hard, packed snow embossed with tire tracks. There wasn’t much traffic.

“So what about the skugsniffer?” asked Susan.

“We’ll get ourselves an alternate pair of personalities,” said Alan. “We’ll pose as normal people.”

Susan laughed. “And don’t forget we need new ID.”

“I have an idea for that. See the filling station ahead? We’ll kidnap a brace of sojourners and glean what we need.”

“Kidnap?”

“I’ll teep you the details.”